As more and more companies deploy software-defined storage, I love hearing about the different opportunities customers can take advantage of with StoreVirtual VSA and virtualized servers. So today I’m going to share a couple with you. Enjoy!

The exponential growth of data has forced your organization to look for cost-effective data protection solutions for your virtualized environments whether in the data center or in small and remote offices. Most vendors provide data deduplication solutions that require dedicated storage hardware. This isn’t always a cost-effective solution for remote/virtualized environments. To address this issue while providing greater flexibility, HP has extended the StoreOnce family to provide a software-defined backup solution: HP StoreOnce VSA.This BURA Sunday, I’m sharing all the StoreOnce enhancement details.

A few weeks ago, we made an announcement about 1TB Free StoreVirtual VSA. Today I have a ShortTake that I want to share. Kate Davis had previously posted an article about the free 1TB but this ShortTake on YouTube has become my most watch video ever - over a 155,000 views as I write this post so I want to share it on the blog.

Let me give you a short recap of the free 1TB VSA:

All HP ProLiant Gen9 server models now come standard with a 1TB StoreVirtual VSA license. To make it easy to deploy, we’ve built in the installation of VSA software into the Intelligent Provisioning feature of the servers. Here's a link to a demo I did showing this.

HP and Intel have partnered up to make sure everyone has an opportunity to try out Software-defined storage with our StoreVirtual VSA for themselves. Starting now, anyone who buys a new Intel Xeon E5 processor-based server, regardless of vendor, can get a free 1TB license of StoreVirtual VSA.You just need to register to unlock your free 1TB StoreVirtual VSA storage, then download the VSA software and license key. Or you ask your channel partner to do it for you.

My colleague Kate Davis introduced you to the Free 1TB StoreVirtual VSA in a blog posta few weeks ago. This program is a partnership with Intel. Just to remind you of this program, anyone who buys a new Intel Xeon E5 processor-based server, regardless of vendor, can get a free 1TB license of StoreVirtual VSA.You just need to register to unlock your free 1TB StoreVirtual VSA storage, then download the VSA software and license key.

So why is Intel a part on this program? There is a strong partnership between HP and Intel to bring software-defined storage to customers by leveraging the latest Intel processors. Here's a short discussion between Rob Strechay from HP and Andrea Nelson from Intel.

With technology there’s always opportunity to advance, creating an ongoing evolution of components and products. Once in a while, we get a unique opportunity to advance multiple technologies at once – when software, hardware, and customer requirements all converge and we surge into the future. We have hit that sweet spot today, and can advance data center design by bringing server, storage and management components together within a single platform – this is what hyper-convergence is all about. To help you adopt a New Style of IT with a solution that evokes the elements of simplicity and efficiency, we now offer a hyper-converged platform portfolio for VMware environments. Here are all the details.